The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer

TELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Good evening. I'm Elizabeth Farnsworth. Jim Lehrer is off tonight. On the NewsHour a scorecard on human rights worldwide, Margaret talks to Assistant Secretary of State John Shattuck about the annual Human Rights Survey; drug resistance, super bacteria, Tom Bearden reports; bipartisanship, is it over rated, we hear from regulars Doris Kearns Goodwin and Michael Beschloss plus David Pryor and Lynn Martin; and a David Gergen dialogue about educating young people to keep up with the changing economy. It all follows our summary of the news this Thursday. NEWS SUMMARY

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: The State Department issued its annual worldwide survey of human rights today. The review of policies in 193 countries found a pattern of repression and abuse among allies and adversaries of the United States. The report concluded that some of the world's largest nations are abusing their citizens. China, Nigeria, Burma, and Cuba were cited for some of the worst practices. Secretary of State Albright put a special emphasis on religious freedom. She spoke at the State Department.

MADELEINE ALBRIGHT, Secretary of State: Third, I wanted to express particularly concern today about religious persecution and intolerance. These are plagues that from ancient times have fomented war and deep-seated resentment. In too many countries, from Sudan to Vietnam to Iran, this form of repression persists. In a few, including China, it has increased. Whatever your culture, whatever your creed, the right to worship is basic. Broadening the recognition of that right and placing the spotlight on its denial will be a priority of our human rights policy.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: We'll have more on the story right after the News Summary. On Capitol Hill today Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan asked Congress to change the way the federal government calculates inflation. He agreed with economists who say the current measure of inflation, known as the Consumer Price Index, is overstated by around 1 percent. The CPI is used to determine cost of living increases for recipients of Social Security and other government benefits. Greenspan said Congress should set up an independent commission to periodically determine how much the CPI overstates inflation. That figure would then be used to lower the annual cost of living increases based on the index.

ALAN GREENSPAN, Chairman, Federal Reserve Board: If we do nothing, we are going to find it very difficult subsequent to say the period--say starting 10 years from now when the baby boomers so called start to retire. And the arithmetic is very daunting. It creates a very large increase in benefit payments under existing law and existing means of indexation. And some significant actions, in my judgment, are going to have to be implemented to come to grips with that.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Two more cabinet nominees moved through the confirmation process today. The Senate voted ninety-five to two to confirm Chicago attorney William Daley to be secretary of commerce, and the Senate Energy Committee sent Federico Pena's nomination for energy secretary to the full Senate for a vote. Pena was transportation secretary during President Clinton's first term. Also today the Senate Judiciary Committee approved a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution. The Republican plan will now go to the full Senate for debate. A vote is expected next month. If it also passes the House, it must still be ratified by 3/4 of the states. The amendment would require the Congress and the president to enact a balanced budget each year. In medical news today smokers are inhaling more tar, nicotine, and carbon monoxide than cigarette labels indicate. That finding was in a study commissioned by the state of Massachusetts. Ten brands of American cigarettes were involved. A lawyer for the tobacco industry said testing machines used in the study did not accurately duplicate how a person inhales. And in other health news the New England Journal of Medicine today endorsed marijuana prescriptions for medical use. California and Arizona have made the drug legal for medicinal purposes. Journal editors also wrote that long-term use of the drug is probably not good for healthy people. In Houston, Texas, today a wall, killing two people and injuring six. Officials believe more bodies will be found under the debris. Tracking dogs and heavy equipment were brought in to aid the search. The collapse occurred at a vacant department store that was being renovated. There was no indication of what caused the collapse. In Bulgaria today anti- government protesters filled city streets and staged road blocks and strikes throughout the country. This was the 25thday of demonstrations protesting the ruling Socialist Party's failure to push economic reform and halt spiraling poverty. In the capital of Sofia, some student marchers tied themselves together as a symbol of government repression. There was also more unrest in Serbia today. This was the 74th day of anti-government marches in Belgrade. Riot police did not attempt to stop thousands who again called for the Milosevic regime to accept election victories by opposition candidates. And in Albania, police did step in to stop anti-government protests. The Interior Minister reported that hundreds have been arrested for rioting in the last week. Demonstrators were angry about money they lost in failed pyramid investment schemes. And that's it for the News Summary tonight. Now it's on to the State Department's human rights report card, bionic bacteria, bipartisanship, is it overrated, and a Gergen dialogue about modernizing education. FOCUS - PATTERNS OF ABUSE

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: We start tonight with a human rights report card for the world. Margaret Warner has the story.

MARGARET WARNER: Today the State Department issued its 20th annual survey of human rights practices in 193 countries around the globe. The report said that despite the spread of democracy and the end of the Cold War, there seemed to be more human rights abuses than ever. Some of the strongest criticism was reserved for China and Cuba, but American allies, such as Turkey, Israel, and Indonesia, also were targeted for alleged abuses. With us now is the State Department's point man for human rights, Assistant Secretary John Shattuck. Welcome, Mr. Secretary.

JOHN SHATTUCK, Assistant Secretary of State: Thank you very much.

MARGARET WARNER: First explain to us what this human rights report really measures. When you go in to assess a country for human rights, what are you looking at?

JOHN SHATTUCK: This report looks at the human rights situation in 193 countries around the world in categories of civil and political rights but also rights involving discrimination, discrimination against women, discrimination against children. But perhaps first and foremost, we're looking for issues of killings and government involvement in those issues. We're looking at torture. We're looking at freedom of expression, and the basic underpinnings of civil and political rights that are recognized in the universal declaration of human rights. These are the fundamental elements, and they're looked at for 193 countries, and I might add that the United States, itself, has reported to the U.N. on its own human rights situation in this administration for the first time. So this is not simply an assessment of the world. In a separate report we've reported on our human rights situation.

MARGARET WARNER: So in this report what would you say is the biggest disappointment?

JOHN SHATTUCK: Well, I think we see continuing repression of basic civil and political rights in a number of countries, and in some cases really stepped up. Certainly in China, we've seen this year that all public dissent has been silenced. We have also seen in Burma that a continuing rolling repression of the democratic process in Burma and the isolation of Aun Sang Suu Kyi, the democratically elected leader of Burma. We also see situations in Nigeria of continuing pressure on basic human rights and civil rights in that country. There are a number of instances of that kind.

MARGARET WARNER: Now, in China, as you said, I mean, all dissidents have been exiled or jailed, no dissident activity, not even a Soviet Union after Stalin managed to achieve that. How do you explain it?

JOHN SHATTUCK: Well, let me say that China is extremely complex. At the same time that you have this tremendous crackdown on political dissent, you also have some longer-term developments in legal reform, for example, in the new criminal procedure law that was adopted in China this year. You also have some developments at the local level involving village elections. But the bottom line is that the central government has decided that it will not put up with basic dissent, and that, of course, is a fundamental violation of the human rights of Chinese citizens.

MARGARET WARNER: Now, what does that say about the theory that I think we've all operated under that with--with economic or market reforms and freedoms, that those lead ultimately to political freedom, say as they did in South Korea, that--the theory being that a middle class develops and that the middle class demands political and personal freedom?

JOHN SHATTUCK: Well, I think what we see is that economic change, including the opening of market economies, can have a positive influence and I would even say in China is having some influence on human rights. But that is not enough. Basic political and civil rights are ultimately at--require more active engagement and more involvement by the government and more recognition by the government is not simply an automatic process whereby economic growth necessarily brings about political change.

MARGARET WARNER: The president earlier this week in his press conference conceded or acknowledged that the U.S. policy towards China of constructive engagement, jawboning about human rights but not holding everything else hostage to human rights, hadn't produced the desired effect. Do you think it's time to re-examine that policy?

JOHN SHATTUCK: I think the policy has to be looked at in a very long-term process. We know that China isolated is not going to improve the human rights situation. Chinese dissidents, both here and in the United--and in China would take that position. We know from history that an isolated China was what produced the cultural revolution which was so damaging to human rights in China. We also want to promote a more open China, and the best way to do that is to engage with China and to involve the Chinese citizens in exchanges, as well as a very active and aggressive and clear human rights policy that is expressed to the Chinese leadership again and again by the United States from the president on down. And that is what we're doing.

MARGARET WARNER: Now in the rest of Asia where there has been some resistance to what they see as--the imposition of these western values, what would you say are the brightest spot and the dimmest spot in the rest of Asia?

JOHN SHATTUCK: Well, these comparative approaches don't necessarily get us very far, but we certainly see democracy and human rights developing in other parts of Asia. In Mongolia, which of course is between China and Russia, we've had an outbreak of wonderful outpouring of democracy. In South Korea, some advances, and certainly we've seen elsewhere in Thailand and other parts and Cambodia elections have taken place, so the process of democracy and human rights is marching forward in Asia, and I would argue that there is a tremendous grassroots, global movement for human rights and democracy which is reflected in Asia and every other part of the world even as these abuses occur at the hands of government. There are people all over the world who are trying to advance human rights, and it's for them that these reports are written, and that is to keep faith with this movement as it marches forward.

MARGARET WARNER: All right. And staying with Asia for a minute, you mentioned Burma as a place where things aren't getting better but getting worse. What can the U.S. do about that?

JOHN SHATTUCK: Well, the U.S. has made very clear to the Burmese government that if it wants anything like a better relationship with the United States it has got to enter into dialogue with Aun Sang Suu Kyi and the forces of democracy. The U.S. has imposed arms restrictions, has had trade restrictions in the area of generalized system of preferences on Burma. We have imposed visa restrictions on the government of Burma, and there is active, very active consideration being given now to additional sanctions being imposed on Burma that doesn't recognize the democratic forces.

MARGARET WARNER: Like what?

JOHN SHATTUCK: Well, the legislation that was enacted in the Congress last year authorized the president to impose additional investment restrictions on new investment. And that's under very active consideration right now.

MARGARET WARNER: And how soon would you expect a decision?

JOHN SHATTUCK: Well, I think it's, as I say, very actively being considered. I think at any point there could be a decision.

MARGARET WARNER: What is the record, do you think, of really how effective actions by outside governments such as the United States are, whether it's through sanctions or through jawboning, what impact they really have on another government's internal--the way they relate to their populations, is what we're really talking about.

JOHN SHATTUCK: Well, I think we see some examples of a tremendous success when a very large number of countries in the world get together and make clear that a particular practice in the community in one country is unacceptable. South Africa and apartheid is probably the paramount example where trade sanctions in that country imposed by a very broad coalition of governments made a difference. But I want to make it clear that sanctions and negative approaches to this are by no means what the United States focuses primarily on. We want to assist, build new institutions. We focused on the development of international tribunals to try cases of genocide and war crimes in Bosnia and Rwanda. We've helped developed field operations for the United Nations that can monitor human rights situations. And so the affirmative assistance that we provide in theseareas--we also support many non-governmental organizations. I think it's a very important instrument of advancing human rights.

MARGARET WARNER: Well, now one of the countries where we've tried those kinds of measures and jawboning and encouragement has been Turkey, an ally of ours, a NATO member. We're trying to get the European Union to let Turkey in, and yet, that's a place you say your report finds there's been deterioration this year. How do you explain that?

JOHN SHATTUCK: Well, I think Turkey is, as you say, an ally of the United States, but these reports are very candid, and they make very clear when there are problems. And I think the debate that is going on in Turkey on the subject of human rights is a very healthy one. The United States has not hesitated to raise lots of particular cases and to address the crackdown on the press and the crackdown on civilian populations in the Southeast of Turkey. We want to encourage Turkey to become a secular democracy that is oriented toward Europe.

MARGARET WARNER: But we wouldn't--would we ever really consider punitive sanctions against Turkey?

JOHN SHATTUCK: Well, we have a policy, for example, that restricts small arms and crowd control devices and other armaments that might impact on the human rights situation, while at the same time continuing to work with Turkey as a NATO ally.

MARGARET WARNER: As I know you're aware, the U.S. Government-- critics of the U.S. Government, such as say Human Rights Watch, say that there really is a double standard here; that when it comes to Iran, Iraq, Cuba, we do slap--the U.S. Government slaps sanctions on them, uses the human rights record as one reason, but when it comes to allies or countries we need the relationship, whether it's Saudi Arabia or Russia or China, we don't. I mean, is there a double standard?

JOHN SHATTUCK: No. There's no double standard. There is no one- size-fits-all human rights policy, and every country in the world, of course, is different, and what we want to do, wherever possible, is to work with countries and work with many groups of countries to improve the overall situation in human rights. If a country is willing to engage with us on these subjects, then sanctions are inappropriate, to be sure, and indeed, we would then develop a much stronger relationship with that country, and yet, there are countries like Iran and Iraq and other countries that do not want to work on these subjects, and, therefore, isolation is appropriate.

MARGARET WARNER: So if we were sitting here a year from now and you're presenting your next report, where do you think is the greatest likelihood, not hope but likelihood of measurable progress?

JOHN SHATTUCK: Well, I think there's also been a great deal of progress even this year. I would say the most difficult but challenging and in many ways hopeful areas are the ones that are places that we've concentrated on like Bosnia, like Haiti. I would expect additional progress to be seen in Central and Eastern Europe. We saw this year a tremendous amount of progress in those countries, particularly in Hungary and Rumania and the Czech Republic, which all worked out arrangements on minority rights protection. I think we would expect to see the forces of democracy to achieve some success, continuing success in many parts of Africa. We've seen some of the most quiet advances this year in places like Sierra Leone and Mali. We look for more progress in those areas. But let me say one last thing about the report, which is that it is intended to shine a spotlight on abuses so that they are not forgotten. Because if those abuses were forgotten, then the forces of human rights and democracy would not be able to advance.

MARGARET WARNER: All right. Well, thank you, Mr. Secretary.

JOHN SHATTUCK: Thank you. FOCUS - SUPER BUG

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Next, super bugs, a deadly byproduct of modern medicine's assault on infectious diseases. Tom Bearden reports.

TOM BEARDEN: In hospitals all over America doctors are now forced to put on protective clothing to go in the same room with some of their patients. It's because more and more people are turning up with infections that are all but untreatable. This man's body contains a bacteria called VRE. It's resistant to every antibiotic known. It hasn't made him sick yet, but if it becomes infectious and enters his bloodstream, his chances of survival are less than 50 percent because there won't be any drugs to treat it. The special isolation procedures are designed to keep the germs from spreading to other patients in the hospital whose immune systems have been compromised by transplants or disease. Dr. Stuart Levy is a leading researcher into antibiotic resistant bacteria.

DR. STUART LEVY, Tufts University: I would say that there probably is no hospital in the country that doesn't have a VRE problem of some sort. And that means that all these news precautions have to be taken; rooms have to be made as single rooms, gowns have to be available, globes, washings, it's all got to be new training.

TOM BEARDEN: New training because this is the first time since antibiotics were discovered that germs have gained the upper hand, and VRE isn't the only problem. Every one of the 160 antibiotics on the market today have been compromised by at least one resistant strain of bacteria, and the list is growing every day.

DR. STUART LEVY: I think it's very, very serious. This decade has seen the emergence of bacteria that are resistant to all but one drug or even bacteria that are resistant to every drug. We've never experienced that in the history of antibiotics, and certainly not in the United States. What it means, I think, is that we're just seeing a beginning and what worries me is that there are few patients suffering from these almost untreatable infections now, that the future will show us many, many more.

TOM BEARDEN: At a microbiology laboratory at Tufts University in Boston, Dr. Levy leads a team of scientists trying to find solutions.

DR. STUART LEVY: This is one way of determining whether a bacterium is susceptible or resistant to an antibiotic. You can test many antibiotics on a single plate. This is called the E test, and what happens here is that as you go through the center the lowest concentration is found, so you'll see in the background all this haziness are bacteria growing. And when you see the halo, it means you've reached a concentration of the antibiotic in which the bacterium can grow.

TOM BEARDEN: The reason that bacteria are now able to defeat powerful antibiotics is because they have mutated and developed ways to resist the drug's attacks. It's survival of the fittest at the most basic level.

DR. STUART LEVY: If you were to catch an infection today, its chances of being resistant to one, two, even three, four antibiotics is millions of times greater than it was even seven, eight years ago. So what it says is that the environment is now loaded with resistant bacteria. That's not the simple consequence of a single organism happening to be resistant. That means that there's been a whole change in our ecology.

TOM BEARDEN: The change occurred because one bacteria like VRE can transfer its resistance to another strain by sharing genetic information. Alan Proctor is head of infection disease research for the drug manufacturer, Pfizer, Incorporated.

AL PROCTOR, Pfizer: Bacteria are very promiscuous. They exchange genes one amongst the other, and these genes eventually get transferred around to other bacteria.

TOM BEARDEN: The potential consequences are troubling. For example, in some parts of the country, the organism that causes most common ear infections has become resistant. The risk of the bacteria migrating to the brain and causing potentially fatal meningitis is now markedly greater. The medical community fears that the organism will soon be completely immune to antibiotics and that it will spread across the country. Medical science finds itself facing these increasingly difficult bugs partly because of complacency.

ANNOUNCER ON FILM: In Atlantic City three thousand scientists convened for exchange of information on progress and experimental biology.

TOM BEARDEN: Antibiotics truly were miracle drugs when they were appeared. Penicillin was the first, isolated in the 1940's. Literally millions of people owe their lives to penicillin and the products that followed. They quickly and easily defeated infectious diseases that were once the scourge of mankind. Bacteria started to show resistance even then, but the drug companies were able to easily churn out antibiotic variants that remained effective. The market for antibacterials soon became over saturated. Drug companies stopped developing new products because there was no apparent need. The National Foundation for Infectious Diseases says half of all drug companies completely abandoned anti-bacterial research in the 1980's. Alan Proctor's company, Pfizer, stayed in.

ALAN PROCTOR: The world became somewhat complacent about two decades ago because anti-bacterials were so effective, we had such a very sharp rise in the ability to fight disease that people thought the game was over.

TOM BEARDEN: Scott Rocklage, CEO of Cubist Pharmaceuticals, says the drug companies thought the future lay in fighting AIDS and HIV, diseases which ironically ended up adding to the bacteria problem.

SCOTT ROCKLAGE, Cubist Pharmaceuticals: As the pharmaceutical companies directed their infectious disease research budgets, primarily to HIV and other viral infections, at the same time that was happening, the bugs were becoming more sophisticated, and around the early 1990's the resistance trends increased dramatically as the advent and increase in the immune system compromised patient population came to the clinical setting. We ended up with a wonderful host for the growth of resistance organisms.

TOM BEARDEN: Dr. Levy thinks the public and the medical community also must bear some of the blame. In his book, "The Antibiotic Paradox," Levy says antibiotics became too popular for their own good. Because they're successful drugs with few side effects, antibiotics tend to be overused and misused. People also often don't take the full course of medication, allowing the targeted organisms time to develop genetic defenses.

DR. STUART LEVY: I think we've bred the organisms, and it's not just the clinician that gives the antibiotic. It's the patient who demands them; it's the patient who stockpiles them; it's the patient who gives them as a good Samaritan to the neighbor, to a person who's on the same vacation trip. "Oh, I happen to have some leftover penicillin tablets; you ought to take them." I mean, they're giving away antibiotics as if this isthe thing we should do. It's really nice to do it. And, in fact, what it has done is to create an environment which is much more heavily populated with resistant strains of these bacteria than we had before.

TOM BEARDEN: Dr. Neil Kesselman says patients often press doctors for antibiotics. Kesselman is a pediatrician with the Health Maintenance Organization Kaiser Permanente.

DR. NEIL KESSELMAN, Pediatrician: It's a very difficult thing to know what the right thing is to do. It would be wonderful--I personally would like to take care of an ear infection by saying to a mom there is an ear infection, and the information I have, which is the experience in the Netherlands, is that most of the ear infections go away, or a significant number of them go away without treating. I've presented that to a few people. I've had one person say, yes, that's worth the experiment, but on the other hand, I look at the mom and say, goll, this lady is working. She's going to have to come back in three days to see what that ear looks like, and the standard of care in the United States for so many years has been the antibiotics on day one, very, very difficult to buck the trend.

TOM BEARDEN: Sometimes antibiotics are prescribed when they can do no good, like for a patient who has a viral infection like a cold. The drugs kill off beneficial bacteria, turning patients' bodies into breeding grounds for resistant bacteria because they have no competition. But Dr. Kesselman says deciding whether an infection is bacterial or viral is not always a cut and dried decision.

DR. NEIL KESSELMAN: It's very difficult to tell viral versus bacterial in many instances. Typical examples are colds, trying to differentiate a cold from a sinus infection, trying to differentiate a red throat, viral versus strep, trying to differentiate conjunctivitis or pink eye, bacterial versus viral.

TOM BEARDEN: This little boy got an antibiotic in an emergency room where his parents had taken him because he was wheezing, but it turned out he had viral pneumonia, an infection that doesn't respond to antibiotics. Even so, Kesselman doesn't fault the emergency room physician for prescribing the medication.

DR. NEIL KESSELMAN: Pneumonia is another great example. Most of the pneumonias we know about are viral, but typically people will come in, they'll hear that word, the doctor will be a little worried, they'll go home with an antibiotic. So it's a dilemma. Are you doing the person a favor by giving the antibiotic, or are you doing--are you wasting their time and actually possibly endangering the rest of us in our public health with all the resistant bacteria that are around?

TOM BEARDEN: The only solution is to develop new antibiotics. Easier said that done. Research takes time and a lot of money. And the approval process takes years. But the new super bugs have created a whole new market opportunity, and drug companies are now scrambling for a cut of the estimated $26 billion profit to be made. But they know the old approaches won't work. Super bugs require more sophisticated weapons. Some of the most promising avenues appear to be in genetic engineering, something that big drug companies don't know much about.

DOCTOR: So the next step will be to isolate the gene, and then what do we do after that?

TOM BEARDEN: So several of them working to find new bacterial targets have gone into partnership with the biotech company Cubist Pharmaceuticals. Another biotech company, Microcide Pharmaceuticals, has also partnered with the drug giant Pfizer to attack what they believe is the Achilles heel of bacteria, their genetic structure.

ALAN PROCTOR: This machine allows us in a very short period of time to determine the DNA sequence; that is the ATGS, the code that makes up the information inside that specific gene. Our approach has been genetically directed to identify those weak spots in the bacteria which have through mutation we could eliminate for a while and then put back the bacteria will die. That's what we want a drug to do. You take the drug, the bacterium dies.

TOM BEARDEN: Early results from the genetic approach are encouraging, but even the most promising drugs can't be ready before the year 2000, despite the fact that the Food & Drug Administration has committed to a fast track for testing new antibiotics. Many doctors are deeply worried that in the meantime, a lot of people will get seriously ill and even die from infections that until a few years ago were easily curable.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Still to come on the NewsHour tonight, bipartisanship and a David Gergen dialogue. FOCUS - MAKING NICE

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Now, bipartisanship, how desirable is it? This month, the Republican-dominated 105th Congress was sworn in, and President Clinton was inaugurated for his second term. From both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue there were calls for more bipartisanship in government. President Clinton made this appeal last week in his inaugural address.

PRESIDENT CLINTON: [Jan. 20] The American people returned to office a president of one party and a Congress of another. Surely they did not do this to advance the politics of petty bickering and extreme partisanship they plainly deplore. [applause] No. They called on us instead to be repairers of the breach and to move on with America's mission.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Now, four perspectives on whether partisanship can or should be reduced in Washington. We hear from NewsHour regulars presidential historians Doris Kearns Goodwin and Michael Beschloss. They are joined tonight by two former legislators. Democrat David Pryor served three terms in the Senate before retiring in 1996. He's now a Fulbright Fellow of Law and Public Affairs at the University of Arkansas. Republican Lynn Martin served five terms in the House. She also was secretary of labor in the Bush administration. She is now a corporate consultant and a professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. Thank you all for being with us. And starting with you, Madam Secretary, you've worked at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. How important is bipartisanship?

FORMER REP. LYNN MARTIN, [R] Illinois: Sometimes very important, sometimes not important at all. It's obviously flavor of the month right now in Washington because it sounds so nice. The reality is common sense should drive much of what one does. We've seen some cabinet appointments that have gone through in a bipartisan way. That's what it ought to be. But there should be differences between the parties. I think maybe what's happened in Washington that is--aside from a heavy dose of hypocrisy on this bipartisanship question right now--is the differences people used to be able to disagree and then get together on other issues, maybe even have dinner or a drink together and be friends. That's what seems to be missing. So I don't think we should be searching for bipartisanship. I think we should be searching for the kind of thinking that reminds people what a joy public service can be, not how nasty it is.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Sen. Pryor, what do you think about that? Do you think something's changed andthe call for bipartisanship is really kind of a mistake and looking for something else?

FORMER SEN. DAVID PRYOR, [D] Arkansas: [Fayetteville, Arkansas] Well, partisanship by itself, standing alone, is not all that evil nor sinful. I think they expect us to advance our party's positions and our party's goals and aspirations for the people and the constituencies that we represent. But where I might take a little bit of disagreement with my friend, Secretary Lynn Martin, is to say where she says common sense should drive our decisions, I think that common decency has an equal role to play. What we've seen really in about the last 50 years is where we used to see in the South most of the congressional seats occupied by Democrats; we now see for the first time in history that most of those seats are now occupied by Republicans. We saw in the past some of those administration Democrats who ultimately side with and vote with the Republicans, and it would create a majority vote or at least enough votes to instigate a filibuster situation, as it might in the Senate. But now we're seeing a true partisanship because we have seen a shifting of these particular seats. And they're shifting into one party or another, thus creating this convergence, I guess, of what we call partisanship. But it's the personal destruction of individuals that bothers me in our system that did not exist 50 years ago. It exists today, and it exists to an extent that I think endangers the system and certainly discourages those people that I'm with, the young people on the campus of the University of Arkansas, from entering this field of politics now, which has become the killing field.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Doris Kearns Goodwin, it didn't exist 50 years ago? Let's get a little historical perspective on bipartisanship.

DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN, Presidential Historian: Well, on the surface obviously bipartisanship is a good thing in a democracy in the sense that you need compromise in a democracy, and people have to go along with whatever it is you're passing, a policy or legislation. In fact, Madison once said when he was asked what are the great principles of the Constitution, he said, there are three: compromise, compromise, compromise. But on the other hand, it depends on if you can say that bipartisanship is the means to an end, the real judge is what are the ends, what are the goals that it's reaching, and I can show you two different examples. I think right at the time of World War II and in the post war period, bipartisanship was a great thing, when it meant that Roosevelt brought in Simpson and Knox during World War II, when it meant that Truman and Eisenhower got Republicans behind them on the Marshall Plan, on point four, on fighting the Cold War, those goals were great, so on the other hand, bipartisanship was good. But then you look at the war in Vietnam, and something that Taft warned about with bipartisanship, he said, sometimes if you stop politics at the water's edge, you don't have debate, it's a danger to the nation. There was too little debate on the war in Vietnam. The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution went through too quickly. Indeed, had Lyndon Johnson had to bring his policy to Congress, had they fought with him, and they told him what would work and what wouldn't work, his presidency might have been saved, and the country might have been a wholly different thing. So you judge the ends, rather than the means, although compromise is a good thing most of the time.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Michael, do you agree, you judge the ends, not the means? Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't?

MICHAEL BESCHLOSS, Presidential Historian: Yes. I think Doris is absolutely right. And, you know, if you look at sort of the great things that our system has achieved, another example would be civil rights legislation early in the New Deal and even the build up toward World War II, just as a few examples in this century, they came as the culmination of great debates between the president and congress, between the two parties. They were done in most cases with some civility which we like to see, but the system works best if you have differences that exist among the American people represented in the structure of this process. Our founders wanted there to be conflict. The problem with the talk about bipartisanship nowadays I think is that it's like motherhood, something that no one is going to be against, when, in fact, if you look at this century, you've seen calls for bipartisanship generally when presidents lose congress. Wilson did on some issues in 1919; Herbert Hoover in 1931. The clip that we saw of Bill Clinton at the beginning of this segment was almost exactly the same words that George Bush used, Lynn Martin's old boss, in 1989 in his inaugural. He said the American people didn't send us here to bicker. I think that if George Bush had come in with a big Republican Congress, he wouldn't have said that. He would have said, I'm now going to really enter mortal combat with the Democrats, because he would have had that kind of power.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: And Madam Secretary, is something else also going on? Is it a way when you're asking people to put up with say a lowering of their benefits, of their entitlements? Is it a way to avoid responsibility for it?

LYNN MARTIN: Oh, sure. I mean, probably if we wanted to talk about getting things back, we should cut the number of staffs and probably have a law that said no more commissions, you know; get there and actually vote on something that's hard. But it might mean loss of jobs for people who truly think they're doing something right. You know, I don't know why we're surprised that members of congress generally want to keep a job, or a member of the senate. And there's nothing wrong with that. I think we're forgetting something else that's very different today, and that's it suddenly every member of congress and president and the president's staff, as difficult is this to believe, all became dear and nice, we'd still be watching screaming matches on television; we'd still be reading in the newspapers awful, dreadful things. So it isn't any more just about members of congress; it's not the reality; it's the perception on how the American people--the difference today, though, is the American people are turning them off--

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Are you saying that--

LYNN MARTIN: --when they think they're being petty.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Just so I'm clear, are you saying that even if a majority of congress is working in a bipartisan way, we would only see the screaming matches?

LYNN MARTIN: Absolutely.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Is that what you're saying?

LYNN MARTIN: We'd not only see the screaming matches among the press and among the consultants because that's now who's giving to most Americans what they hear about government. We're not hearing from office holders the way we used to. We're hearing through the filter of consultants and columnists.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Well, you and Sen. Pryor seem to be saying something similar. You were making a distinction, weren't you, Sen. Pryor, between bipartisanship and being very partisan but being civil, is that the distinction you were making too?

DAVID PRYOR: I think that it is the civility that worries me so much more than the rising statistics of partisanship votes in the past twenty or thirty years in the House and Senate. It's the lack of civility or the growing incivility, I think. They're still--most of the congress are very civilized people, and they want to conduct their businesses in a civilized way. But 30 years ago we would never think of going into a state and campaigning against one of our colleagues, for example, who's our seat mate maybe at the lunch counter or down in the senate dining room. We would never think about going out and raising money against one of our colleagues, or, if we did, we would certainly call 'em on the phone and say, hey, Jack, I'm coming to your state this weekend; I'm not going to say anything rough about you; I know you will know that I'm your friend. We just don't seem to have that same thing. I think that some of the panelists will remember when I believe it was Congressman Sidney Yates, Democrat in Illinois, could not get Jack Kennedy, President John Kennedy, to come to the state and campaign for him. And Congressman Yates got very infuriated against--about this in-appearance or non-appearance of President Kennedy. President Kennedy liked the individual that Sidney Yates was running against, and I think he was in a senate campaign at that time, and he did not go into the state to challenge him. That sort of camaraderie that used to sort of hold the House and Senate together is something that I fear is waning and somehow or another we need to restructure that if we can.

DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN: Oh, I agree.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Yes, Doris. What do you think about that? Has it definitely changed?

DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN: Oh, I really think so. I think there was an institutional patriotism when you belonged to the House and the Senate. It was the culmination of your life to be in that job. You spent time in Washington. You didn't run around quite as much in your district because the transportation wasn't as great. So there were friendships that formed, and it was that friendship that, for example, Lyndon Johnson was able to deal with when he needed bipartisan support to get the filibuster ended on civil rights. He could go to Dirksen. He had spent hours with him sitting at night, drinking, swapping stories. He got Hubert Humphrey to go up to the Hill and say, I've courted Dirksen more assiduously than I courted my wife, Muriel. And he made Dirksen feel if you go with me on civil rights and break this southern filibuster, you will be writing a chapter in the history of the Senate, and you will be proud. I'm not sure that that same sense of belonging to an institution in a time of weakened parties, a time of so much money, putting each person on an individual platform, and a time of less patriotism really to the congress exists, is much possible today.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Michael, we're hearing a lot of positive things about bipartisanship. What are the dangers? What about voters who have very definite views, if their views aren't represented by somebody? Is there a danger that they will go off and--

MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: The danger is they check out of the system. We know that people vote when they feel that casting a vote for one party or another, one candidate or another, is going to be a real change in policy. If you have both parties with somewhat muddy views that don't seem very different, turn out goes down and also the conflict in our society is not embodied in thepolitical system. One other point, and that is that I think in the 1990's, much less than for instance the 1960's that Doris mentioned, members of congress, others in political office, are a lot less willing to lose at times for political principle. You look, for instance, at some of the conservative Republicans in the 1960's. They were against the Great Society; they were against big government; and they basically said this is a period in which our ideas are not in vogue, but we're not going to try to fuzz up what we're saying in order to be momentarily popular; we're going to stick to these views and wait till our time comes again and in the meantime critique what the dominant group is doing. And I think that was something that was very useful for the country. I think we're not served in this period by having two parties and two sets of leaders who are pretending that they believe the same things.

LYNN MARTIN: Before we get mired in this nostalgia for the past, I mean, I thought it was nice too but not quite as nice as everyone remembers.

MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: It's an occupational hazard of historians.

LYNN MARTIN: I guess that's right. That's true. But in this case, since, you know, most history isn't that close, these were--these were clubs. It's easy to talk, for instance, about, and there were some wonderful southern senators, but I wonder if I were an African-American from Mississippi if I'd think it was quite as charming as we now remember some of these things. I wonder now that we do have more representatives across the incredible changing parts of America. So I think we have to be very careful of terms. Of course one ought to be civil, and that's part of it. But, you know, a country that goes and sees Beavis and Butthead, why does it surprise us that, boy, some of our politicians aren't civil, so they are reflecting society, and maybe we should all take a look at it. But the reality is here when you're fighting for a great thing, if you believe in it, you shouldn't be talking about bipartisanship. You should be talking about what you think best for the country and risk losing if that's what has to be done.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Thank you all very much. That's all the time we have. DIALOGUE

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: And finally tonight, a Gergen dialogue. David Gergen, editor at large of U.S. News & World Report, engages Richard Murnane, professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and Frank Levy, professor of urban economics at MIT. They are the authors of "Teaching the New Basic Skills: Principles for Educating Children to Thrive in a Changing Economy."

DAVID GERGEN: You gentlemen are both economists, and you've looked at the problems of education. And it seems to me you come out at a very different place with very different recommendations from what educators typically say let's begin there, what were you looking at, you were looking at skills. Frank?

FRANK LEVY, Co-Author, "Teaching the New Basic Skills:" Well, we were looking at skills and what kinds of ways these people got with different skills, and if you look at it that way, what you see is that a big mis-match has grown up over the last 15 years in the market for people who don't have good literacy and good numeracy. That market has just collapsed.

DAVID GERGEN: But the schools, themselves, have improved over the last 20 years, but the skill, the need for higher skills has increased dramatically faster than the improvements in the schools?

FRANK LEVY: That's right. And that's what makes the problem so hard to diagnose. Schools today are alittle better than they were 15 years ago, but the job market skills have just escalated much faster than that. I mean, we have an example in the book, "Looking At a Modern Automobile Plant," and about half of today's high school graduates couldn't make the cut-off to be a production worker at a modern automobile plant.

DAVID GERGEN: Say it one more time. Half of the 17-year-olds--

FRANK LEVY: Half of 17-year-olds don't have the skills necessary to make the cut-off of the production worker at a modern automobile plant today.

DAVID GERGEN: That fact just jumped right off the page in your book. Now, let me ask you, Dick, what kind of skills does the high school graduate need today to qualify in the outer world, in the competitive world?

RICHARD MURNANE, Co-Author, "Teaching the New Basic Skills:" To qualify for a job that will pay a middle class wage as minimum the graduate needs to be able to read well enough to understand training manuals, basically ninth grade, able to do the mathematics that's typically included in training manuals, fractions and decimals and line graphs, mastery of that, the ability to problem solve, to take a problem and find what will work, to shape it, to design a solution towards it, and two kinds of what we call soft skills, the ability to communicate effectively both orally and in writing, the ability to work productively with people from different backgrounds, and enough familiarity with computers to have the self-confidence and the knowledge to learn to use new software. You might say these skills are extremely modest, and they are in one sense, and there are lots of jobs that require, that pay good wages that require a lot more than these skills, but there are almost none, outside of professional sports, that do not require at least these new basic skills and also, remember, in terms of whether this is a challenge for schools to provide this, roughly half of American high school seniors are graduating without these new basic skills.

DAVID GERGEN: And if they graduate without them and never get them, they're condemned to live in very low wages?

RICHARD MURNANE: They can find work in most cases but these are jobs that pay six and seven dollars an hour, not enough to support children.

DAVID GERGEN: And if they can get the skills?

RICHARD MURNANE: If they can get the skills, they have a chance at acquiring middle-class jobs and have access to subsequent training when they need it. And these aren't jobs that will be jobs for--that one holds for twenty-five or thirty years. To a large extent, those jobs have disappeared from the economy, but it will be the opportunity to move from job to job and to earn enough to support kids.

DAVID GERGEN: I was interested--Frank, there's a--there's a notion in America today that in order to get a job in the middle class, have a ticket to the middle class, one needs a college degree. You're saying that's not true, what you need is a skill, and you can get that from a good high school.

FRANK LEVY: Right. What's happened is we structured the situation so that we made college into a necessity. When you look at the gap in wages between college and high school graduates, you have to remember who it is that's going to college in the first place. It's typically the kids with the higher than average basic skills, the higher reading ability, the higher math ability. When an employer is looking for somebody with those skills, they can't rely on a high school diploma because that doesn't tell you anything, so increasingly, they're using a bachelor's degree to find people who they know have these skills which really could be and should be learned by the 12th grade.

DAVID GERGEN: Let me ask you this. President Clinton is arguing what we ought to do is to make sure that everybody goes to at least two years of college, a junior college, and that ought to be the place where people pick up the skills. The impression I got from your book was you're saying now what we really ought to do is ensure that K through 12 gives you that, and we don't necessarily have to rely on a community college system to get there.

FRANK LEVY: Yeah. I'd say that's right. It's one thing to say if you bring K through 12 up to where it should be, people who want to go on to community college to learn specific technical skills, that's terrific. But you don't want to use that as a substitute for doing what you should be doing in K through 12.

DAVID GERGEN: Okay.

RICHARD MURNANE: If I can just add a clarification to that, I think if a parent asked today, does my child need to go to college to earn a middle-class living, the answer is, yes, and to a large extent the reason is that employers recognize that a high school diploma does not mean master of these new basic skills. And that's to a large extent why they go on to hire college graduates. So it's not a change an individual needs to make, but rather it's a change in the educational system so that in the future a high school diploma will mean that a graduate does have to master these new basic skills. If that happens, then the answer to a parent's question will be different.

FRANK LEVY: Parents think that U.S. schools in general are terrible, but they think their own child's school is terrific. And that gets back to what we were talking about before. The schools haven't collapsed. That's not what the issue is. And so when a parent visits a school, they say, well, you know, it's doing as well as the school I went to. The kid gets a little more math and gets in computers. So they think things are okay. Now the problem's going to be when the kid hits the labor market. When that happens, the kid is out of the school, and the parents have lost contact with the school. So to start the process you have to let parents understand what's at stake. And right now that isn't the case.

DAVID GERGEN: This notion that your--that's sort of what we call the Lake Woebegone effect, all of our schools are above average in our community.

FRANK LEVY: Absolutely.

RICHARD MURNANE: Another principle is be sure the front line workers have the training that they need. And that's really not the case currently. If you look at professional development for classroom teachers, there are basically these one-day workshops without any follow-up, or the pay for getting a master's degree, when most university courses don't focus on the skills these teachers need to change how they work with the students in their class. There are really needs for dramatic changes, and we give examples in our book of how professional development can be significantly better than it is, how it can change in a way that does provide opportunities for children to learn these new basic skills, soft as well as hard skills.

DAVID GERGEN: Let me ask you this question. I was really interested in the fact that so much of the debate in the country is over other issues like school choice, whether we should put more money in the schools, schools-based management, that sort of thing. You're arguing those are not panaceas; what we ought to be focusing on is the skills.

FRANK LEVY: Well, yes. I think any of those proposals that you talk about, choice or charter schools, are ways of shaking up the system, but then the question comes: what happens after that; in what way does the system move? And what we're arguing in the book is that everybody has to understand what kinds of skills that kids need, that you have to provide the teacher retraining, all the scut work that comes after you shake up the system; there's no way of avoiding that. And so you don't want to sell these things as magic bullets. They're the beginning of the process maybe, but they sure are not the whole process.

DAVID GERGEN: A final question. What advice would you have to a parent or to a teacher or to someone out in the local community who's looking at their schools? They think their schools are above average, but they want to check it out. What should they do?

RICHARD MURNANE: One obvious thing they can do is to look at the kids who graduated two years ago from that school and say, what are those kids doing, because the most likely outcome is that their kids will be doing the same thing, so if the outcomes for their-- for the kids who graduated two years ago are not satisfactory for their child, they need to worry about the quality of education that child is surviving in.

DAVID GERGEN: So the parent should ask for an audit of the students who graduated two years ago or three years ago to see where they are in life, even if they came out of the eighth grade, where are they in the tenth grade, if they came in the twelfth grade, where are they two years later?

FRANK LEVY: That's right. That's right.

DAVID GERGEN: Thank you very much. RECAP

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Again, the major stories of this Thursday, the State Department issued its annual human rights report and cited a number of countries for repression and abuses. The Senate voted to confirm Chicago attorney William Daley as secretary of commerce, and the Senate Energy Committee sent Federico Pena's nomination for energy secretary to the full Senate for a vote. We'll see you on-line and again here tomorrow evening with Shields & Gigot, and more. I'm Elizabeth Farnsworth. Thank you and good night.